European Union (Implications of Withdrawal) Bill [HL]

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. I start by thanking all noble Lords who are to speak today. Other noble Lords who support the Bill but who are unable to speak include the noble Baronesses, Lady Cox and Lady O’Cathain, the noble Lady, Lady Saltoun of Abernethy, the noble Lords, Lord Gilbert, Lord Stevens of Ludgate, Lord Swinfen, Lord Tebbit and Lord Waddington, and the noble Viscount, Lord Trenchard. Noble Lords might also like to know that, somewhat surprisingly, the Bill was also supported enthusiastically this morning on the ““Today”” programme by no less a personage than the former Labour Minister for Europe, Mr Denis MacShane. Students of the history of our ill-fated relationship with the European Union may like to know that a similar Bill was debated on 17 March 2000 and27 June 2003, so four years have passed since we last discussed the desirability of a cost-benefit analysis of our EU membership—four more years of relentless erosion of what was once our proud right to govern ourselves. As before, the Bill does not call for the UK to withdraw from the European Union. It simply calls for an independent inquiry into what life might really be like for our economy, defence and constitution were we to withdraw from the political construct of the EU and continue in free trade and intergovernmental collaboration with our friends on the continent of Europe. The inquiry’s findings must be made public by the end of 2008 in time for the next elections to the European Parliament in 2009 and probably for the next general election as well. Supporters of the Bill hope that these findings will at last generate the widespread, informed public debate about our EU membership which the Government say they want, but which in truth they are keen to avoid. In the past, the Government have always stonewalled our requests for an inquiry, claiming that the benefits of our EU membership are so wondrous and obvious that it would be a waste of time. I fear we may hear more of that today. The proposed inquiry would give us some unbiased answers to some vital questions. Why do we have this project of European integration? How does it actually work? How far has it got and how does it affect us? How much does it cost? Above all, where is it going, and do we want to be part of it when it gets there? There is widespread public ignorance about all those questions and, in recent months, even noble Lords have approached me after some of our debates with questions along the lines of, ““Does it really work like that?””. So, if your Lordships do not mind, I shall again place on the record the basic answers to the first four questions, leaving the last for the Minister at the end of our debate. Anyone who wants to understand in depth how we got to where we are has to read the enduring masterpiece by Christopher Booker and Richard North, The Great Deception, published by Continuum and now in its second edition. In the debate, I have time only to urge your Lordships to remember that the project of European integration is rooted in one big idea: that the nation states were responsible for the carnage of the two world wars and for the long history of bloodshed in Europe. Those European nation states, with their unreliable democracies, must therefore be emasculated and diluted into a new form of supra-national government run by a commission of wise technocrats. This genesis explains why the project works the way it does as the very antithesis of democracy. It explains why the unelected bureaucracy—the Commission—has the monopoly to propose legislation, a function which it carries out in secret. The Commission’s legislative proposals are then negotiated, also in secret, by the shadowy Committee of Permanent Representatives or bureaucrats from the member states known as COREPER. This lines up the decisions to be taken officially in the Council of Ministers, still in disgraceful secrecy, where the UK is now reduced to some 8 per cent of the voting power. The Euro-phile EU Parliament naturally collaborates with all extensions of EU law, which is then executed by the Commission. The only arbiter of any debate is the Luxembourg court, which is required by the treaty to find in favour of the ever-closer unions of the peoples of Europe. This it certainly does, often with admirable imagination. For good measure, the treaties also ordain that areas of national life taken over by Brussels cannot be returned to national parliaments; the ratchet can only grind in one direction. This is known in Euro-speak as the ““Acquis Communautaire””, or powers acquired by the community, and it now runs to some 170,000 pages; 100,000 of which have been passed since 1997. Yet the heart of our democracy remains, and can only be, the hard-earned privilege of the British people to elect and dismiss those who make their laws. That is Members of the House of Commons, assisted under our constitutional settlement by your Lordships. Millions have died for this principle over hundreds of years, but it has been frittered away in pursuit of the outdated European dream by our political establishment without the people’s informed consent. I am often asked how an unelected Peer such as myself dares to extol the value of our democracy over the brave new system of Brussels government. The answer is simple and comes in the form of a question: how would you feel if most of our law was proposed in secret by the unelected House of Lords; was processed in secret largely by collaborating bureaucracies; and was then executed by the self same House of Lords? When you put it like that, the penny begins to drop. The chilling fact is that a large majority of our national law now comes from the EU. The Government do not want to admit this, of course, and so far have only confessed that a majority of law affecting our business is imposed by Brussels, which is bad enough. But we have it on the authority of the former German President, Roman Herzog, that84 per cent of all German national legislation since 1998 has come from Brussels. On Monday of this week, Le Figaro carried the news that the same applies to 80 per cent of French national legislation. It is hard to see why we should be much different. The House of Commons and your Lordships’ House are powerless to reject or amend any of this law, much of which we do not even see. Our representative parliamentary democracy has therefore become largely redundant. We have lost the power to govern ourselves. So that is about how we stand now constitutionally. But, of course, this debate takes place under the shadow of the next EU summit on21 and 22 June, when some of the rejected EU constitution is likely to be revived, although it is not yet clear how much. One thing does seem clear, which is that the British people will not be given a referendum on whatever new treaty may emerge from the secret conclaves of Brussels. We will be told that the new arrangement does not alter the relationship between this country and Brussels. That will not be true, of course, but that will not stop them saying it. They will also say that there is no reason to hold a referendum, because referendums were not held on the Amsterdam, Nice or Maastricht treaties, nor on the Single European Act 1986, all of which drained our sovereignty to Brussels but which neither Labour nor Conservative Governments dared to put to the people. When you come to think of it, that is a seriously dishonest non sequitur, even by the standards of our modern political class. It is as though you go into the cellar one day and find someone you thought was more or less a friend helping himself to the stored family silver. ““Oh,”” he explains, ““I’ve been stealing it for years and you didn’t notice, so I thought it would be all right just to pinch the rest.””. Well, it is not all right. What is more, we want all of it back. Be that as it will be, I cannot understand why the Eurocrats bother about a new treaty at all. It is not as though they have let a small thing like the French and Dutch rejection of the constitution hold up the creation of their megastate. They told us repeatedly that the enlarged EU could not function without the constitution, but they have been passing legislation25 per cent faster since its rejection. They are putting the constitution in place piecemeal, surreptitiously and illegally, using clauses in the existing treaties that were clearly not designed for the purpose. One example is TEC Article 308, which allows Brussels to take power only, "““in the course of the operation of the Common Market””." It was in the original Common Market treaty of Rome in 1957, designed to permit small tariff changes and so on. Use of Article 308 also requires unanimity in the Council, so the Government still have the veto but do not dream of using it. It was not designed to allow the corrupt octopus to take power in areas later covered by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty on European union, such as justice and home affairs or foreign policy and defence. Undaunted, however, Brussels has used Article 308 to take control of civil contingencies and of the prevention and aftercare of terrorism, to launch a €235 million propaganda campaign and to set up its new fundamental rights agency in Vienna. The article has also been used to co-ordinate our social security systems, to impose restrictions on the Taliban and to regulate the use of glucose and lactose. One does not have to be a legal genius to see that none of those initiatives is justified, "““in the course of the operation of the Common Market””." In 1996, however, the Luxembourg Court issued a judgment that sanctions all of them and many more. It did so with breathtaking simplicity, by flatly ignoring the requirement that a new power can only be taken by Brussels if it is necessary in the course of the operation of the Common Market. Instead, the Court agreed that Brussels can take power to do anything that it thinks should have been sanctioned by the treaty but is not. Even then, we are talking about the treaty establishing the European Community, the Common Market treaty, and the initiatives I have mentioned cannot possibly be honestly included in its scope. There is no appeal against the Court’s judgments, however. That is the system by which we are now ruled. I submit that you have to be pretty deaf not to hear the jackboots marching, and pretty naïve not to realise that they are coming this way. That brings me briefly to our national security and defence. Here, too, the failure of the EU’s constitution has done nothing to deflate its military ambitions, which continue to expand in several directions. It has set up a European Defence Agency in which member states pool research, technology and procurement, while the Commission is working on a defence procurement directive. European defence Ministers have also agreed to pool resources to develop a European defence technological and industrial base. They have called for less European dependence on non-European sources for key defence technologies—in other words, Europe must not go on depending on our most valuable ally, the United States of America. Continuing in the anti-US vein, the EU is about to open an EU military planning centre to enable it to plan and run autonomous military operations. NATO and the US have protested about the centre as it will duplicate NATO’s well-established military planning staff. Like the project of European union itself, much of this is inspired by France’s deep psychotic need to bite the hand that freed her in two world wars. But it cannot be wise for us to be part of it to the detriment of our special relationship with Washington. If the Minister disagrees with this analysis—as I fear he will—will he tell us what the Government think France’s attitude is now to collaboration with NATO and the United States? Finally, I turn to the cost of our EU membership and its effect on our economy. Given our Government’s refusal to conduct an official cost-benefit analysis, there have been four private studies in the past five years. These put the annual cost of our EU membership at anything between 4 per cent and 10 per cent of GDP, or between £40 billion and £100 billion per annum. But even the highest of those estimates looks very conservative if we look at some of the official figures which have been published. For instance, the studies of both Commissioner Verheugen and of Her Majesty’s Treasury—Global Europe: full-employment Europe—published in October 2005 agree that EU over-regulation costs the economy some 6 per cent of GDP per annum, or £60 billion per annum for the United Kingdom. A Written Answer last Monday gives the net cost of the agricultural policy as£4 billion per annum and the net cash we send to Brussels each year now stands at £6.5 billion, which is likely to double over the next seven years. Those official figures come to a whopping £70 billion, or more than £1,000 per annum for every man, woman and child in the country. The Treasury report goes even further, estimating that the common agricultural policy costs EU consumers up to 7 per cent of GDP. The present transatlantic trading barriers cost another 3 per cent. It also suggests that increasing euro-zone competition to US levels could boost output by no less than 12 per cent. Even if we leave this last one out, the Treasury report takes the annual cost of our EU membership to some 16 per cent of GDP, or £160 billion per annum, way above the private studies. No doubt the proposed committee of inquiry will look carefully at all these figures and reach its own conclusions. Before leaving the economy, I remind your Lordships that only some 9 per cent of our economy trades with the single market. Some 11 per cent goes to the rest of the world, and 80 per cent stays right here in our domestic economy. Yet the diktats from Brussels strangle the whole 100 per cent of our economy. If we left the political construct of the EU and continued our free trade with it—which of course we would because it trades in surplus with us; we are in fact its largest client—we would not lose any of the 9 per cent which goes to the single market or any of the jobs which depend on it. Set free from Brussels over-regulation and unsuitable foreign trade arrangements, our economy would flourish. In fact, I think it is time to coin a new Euro-sceptic slogan: ““Leaving creates jobs—millions of them””. I come to my final two questions to the Minister. First, does he honestly think that the British people would have voted to stay in what they were assured was just a common market in 1975 if they had known that they would end up where they are today? Secondly, and most importantly, where do the Government think that the project of European union will end? I see three options. First, the octopus may turn into a cuddly teddy bear and decide not to devour any more of our sovereignty. Unlikely, I think. Secondly, the project may overextend itself and fall apart. That would be welcome and probably will happen, but it may take a long time and would be very uncomfortable when it did happen. Thirdly, the project will continue, on track, as it has done in the past, until the EU becomes a totalitarian state. I confess that I fear that this last destination now looks the most likely. The inquiry proposed by the Bill would help the British people to decide whether they wanted to stay in an EU which is already very uncomfortable and which may go badly wrong or whether they would prefer to govern themselves again and reclaim their rightful place in the world. I look forward to the Minister’s reply and commend the Bill to the House. Moved, That the Bill be now read a second time.—(Lord Pearson of Rannoch.)